The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

  This spell of self-vindication lasts for precisely fifteen seconds, which is how long it takes for his voicemail to kick in, at which point he knows she will ring off — she hates leaving messages. As he feels it stop, he imagines her cutting him off in mid-sentence, ‘You’ve reached Si — ’, lying on the rug with the phone on her belly and the handset still to her ear, listening to the dial tone, letting it fill her head with its lonely sound, because she hasn’t reached him at all, she has reached out to him and he hasn’t answered and he knows how sad such things make her, sad out of all proportion, and he wills her to dial again but she doesn’t, she’s given up on him. He is, he thinks, disgusting. But he has reached the entrance to the Tube and will soon be out of range; as he descends into the foetid depths of the tail end of rush hour, he thinks at least he will be home when he said he would be, and hopes she was listening when he told her he’d be late. He will be home by nine, at the latest. He thinks of her pulling that silly big-eyed bug-face, her impression of a butterfly puckering up; he thinks of the other woman’s full fleshy mouth leaving lipstick on his neck; the beer and the whisky and the coffee and the foolishness of what he’s almost done slosh about in his stomach as he jogs to the platform, and to a chorus of tuts he presses himself into the crowded carriage, into the stink of perfume and sweat and after-work booze and thinks he’s no better than the rest of them and his stomach turns as they set off with a lurch into the tunnel.

  Telephone

  Julia lies on the rug listening to the dial tone, deciding whether or not to try once more. He either hasn’t heard his phone or is ignoring her. Why would he ignore her? If he’d just left the office as Joanne said, he would have been heading for the Tube the first time she tried (so he wasn’t working late, after all); she gave him half an hour, waiting impatiently, scrunching the fur with her fingers and bare feet and feeling it heat up under her back; remembering lying there with him and trying now to regain that tenderness, trying to feel anything other than this awful disappointment, this want, this lack. When half an hour at last had elapsed, she tried calling again; he should be on the train home by now. She let it ring on, hung up when she heard his business voice telling her she’d reached him when she hadn’t. She tried again, cut him off again. Now she is listening to the dial tone. She holds the handset to her ear until the sound cuts out to a constant monotone which seems such an empty hopeless sound that it makes her want to cry. Is he ignoring her? She tries one more time. This time it doesn’t ring; his voice answers immediately, straight to voicemail. Underground? Strange, she thinks, sighs, and replaces the handset. She lies there for a while longer. She tries to take comfort:

  Laid out on bearskins, skin against the snow…

  but she cannot find it. The dream which has been so vivid all day to her has vanished; the lights no longer flash unbidden across the sky, the expanse of snow no longer rolls out beyond her. She looks up at the dark red ceiling, at the swirls of the glass lampshade; she knows every whorl. She wonders when he’ll be home, makes plans without consciously hearing herself do it —

  Glaze the carrots, let the lamb rest, thicken the sauce… should I change into something pretty? No, I’ve changed already. Have I changed? Does this change me? Wipe off the red he hates it.

  She lies there longer still, unable to exert the will to raise herself although her back is now uncomfortably hot against the rug. At last she lifts the phone off her stomach and sits up, leaving a sweltered patch of flattened fur behind her; she sits cross-legged with the phone in front of her and taps her top lip with her fingertips. Then she reaches again for the handset and dials another number.

  Miranda is in the locker room at work; she just has time for a cup of tea before starting her shift. She opens her locker and is about to throw her handbag in when she hears her phone ringing, digs it out just in time. Her sister.

  ‘Hi, Julia, what’s up?’

  ‘Hello. Nothing really, I just thought I’d call. Well, it’s just that…’ Miranda’s colleague clatters the door of his locker, greeting her loudly as he does so before turning and silencing himself with that mouth-pursed handflat gesture which means ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you’re on the phone.’ Julia picks up the noise in the background.

  ‘Are you at work? Sorry, I didn’t think.’

  ‘Start in ten minutes, it’s fine. Was it important?’

  ‘No, not really. It doesn’t matter. I can call you tomorrow or…’

  Miranda by now has heard the slight quiver in her sister’s voice which means that it does matter, it is important. She tries not to audibly sigh.

  ‘Come on, something’s up. What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s… Jonathan came to see me today.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our cousin, Jonathan Mackley.’

  ‘Really? The little ginger boy? And?’

  ‘He told me that… Oh, it’s just so weird. I feel so strange. I don’t know, he didn’t seem to think it was at all important, maybe it isn’t but I think it is, and Simon’s not answering his phone and I thought I should tell you too.’

  Miranda is struggling not to betray her impatience; she is also struggling to make her much-needed cup of tea without betraying the sound of her doing so.

  ‘Julia, tell me what?’

  ‘It’s about Emily. She had a… well, Edward… he was her son.’

  Miranda takes the milk from the door of the fridge and bumps it closed with her hip. ‘Edward was… what? Whose son, Emily’s? That seems unlikely, not to say biologically impossible. Wasn’t she younger than him?’

  ‘No, no, the other Edward. Our grandfather Edward.’

  Miranda is quiet. This is, indeed, very strange news. She is attempting to absorb it while also concentrating on unscrewing the top of the milk with one hand.

  ‘Miranda?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here, yes. So, hang on. So you’re saying Grandpa was Emily’s son? Julia, where are you getting this from?’

  ‘Jonathan told me. He says she told him when she was dying and he told his grandfather but she didn’t tell anyone else and neither did he, but they all know about it and he thought we must too.’

  ‘I’m confused; who’s he, and she, and we?’ says Miranda, laughing; but Julia, she realizes, is not in the mood to laugh at her own rambling. She is sounding quite unsteady now. Letting out a soundless nasal sigh, Miranda sits down with her mug and listens. Her shift can wait two minutes; her sister is upset.

  ‘Sorry. Start from the beginning. Emily told Edward that he was her son.’

  ‘And John’s. She slept with John.’

  ‘John who? Our great-grandfather, John?’

  ‘Yes. It’s so… her husband’s brother. It’s so horrible.’

  Miranda and Julia were always close, even as children, both quiet girls who enjoyed mainly their own and each other’s company; they survived together their father’s dying and their mother’s grief, each drawing upon the other’s strength, which they reserved for each other when they could not find their own. They know each other’s nuances as if they were their own; they share gestures and habits unknowingly; if one yawns, covering her mouth with the back of a splayed hand, the other catches the yawn in sympathy, at the other end of the country, and splays a hand to stop it. Sometimes, one of them will turn to the other with a nudge or a giggle, to share something hilarious that she has just remembered, and then she realizes that they are four hundred miles apart and they miss each other terribly.

  They forget to call each other. They don’t speak sometimes for weeks on end. They rarely visit; Miranda’s schedule is tough, she has children to take care of, Julia suspects that she dislikes Simon. Miranda knows full well that

  Julia dislikes Matthew. But lately they have been more lax than usual and although Julia doesn’t know it Miranda has been putting off a call, because she doesn’t like to keep things from her sister but for the last two months she has been seeing a radiographer who works some of the same shifts, and she knows that Julia, w
ho has never been Matthew’s champion, still would not understand.

  So Miranda’s response is not what Julia expected.

  ‘God, yes, it is. It’s so… it’s so sad. Poor Emily.’

  ‘… Really?’

  ‘Just think, all those years pretending. Were they having an affair? Do you think she loved him?’

  ‘John? No, I think she thought her husband was dead and he thought it was a good opportunity for a mercy fuck.’

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘What? It was when those Norwegians turned up, it was in the paper. That day. And afterwards she went to bed for months and pretended to be grieving.’

  ‘Maybe she was.’

  ‘She was pregnant with her husband’s brother’s baby.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she couldn’t be grieving too, does it?’

  ‘But how could she? It’s so… it’s just so sordid.’

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘She said she’d wait.’

  Miranda checks her watch (a sensible, easily read dial with a leather strap, which she always wears). It’s gone eight. She’s late to report for her shift. She is growing exasperated now with her sister, the hopeless romantic. For whom love has always been this perfect unrealized thing, free of the complications of real life, of annoying piles of laundry and dishes and kids yelling and crying and not getting any help, of trying to make breakfast for them all and trying to make your face look less of a train wreck at the same time, of wanting someone just to want you and not necessarily loving them but yes, sometimes just wanting to fuck as if there isn’t this mess of toys and puréed turnip and mortgages and obligations at home, just wanting to get away from it for just a little while and just fuck someone who just wants you, and not everyone’s perfect but some of us will just have to make do.

  There is silence on the other end of the line. ‘Oh. Um…’ says Julia, at which point Miranda realizes that she has said some version of all this out loud. Her voice softens.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Well, yes I did, some of it. Look, Julia. We can’t ever know how it happened. She was lonely. People do strange things when they’re sad. It sounds like it was a one-off. And then, think about it, she had to pay for it the rest of her life, living in that house with her son, and who knows, maybe she was in love with John, she knew him a lot longer than she did her husband, but if she did she couldn’t do anything about it. I feel sorry for them. I know you want the grand romance but really it’s just a woman getting old on her own. Not waiting, just having no choice.’ She hears a small sniff on the other end of the line, and feels the old familiar mix of frustration and tenderness and guilt, she can picture her sitting there on the rug, not crying, her lips clamped, refusing to look up, all confused and sad so that you feel as though you’ve slapped her for no reason or trodden on a kitten.

  ‘Julia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look, I’m late for my shift. I didn’t mean to upset you. Sorry. I didn’t mean what I said, about having kids, and all that. And Emily… I don’t know. I don’t know what to think about it. It was a long time ago. I wonder what Dad would have made of it… Well, at least now we know where you got your lovely eyes from.’

  Sniff.

  ‘It doesn’t change who she was, not really. I still think she was pretty amazing. We should be proud to be her granddaughters.’

  Sniff. Silence. ‘Great-granddaughters.’ Julia, in some things, has a strain of pedantry to rival Simon’s.

  ‘Ah, there you are. Thought I’d lost you. Okay, go and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine or something and think of your poor sister up to her elbows in guts all night. We’ll chat tomorrow, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Thanks, Miranda. You’re probably right.’

  ‘I’m always right.’

  ‘Miranda, what you said about… Are you all right? Is something going on?’

  She’d hoped to have got away with that. Her sister isn’t quite as harebrained as she seems, sometimes.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m fine. Goodnight, sis.’

  ‘Night. Enjoy your… enjoy the guts.’

  And with that, they are cut off. Miranda taps her top lip slowly with her fingertips for a moment, then shakes her head, drains her tea, rubs her face with her hands, repins her sensibly bobbed hair, and leaves the locker room to start her night’s work.

  And Julia? Julia is thinking. She was so sure she was angry, she was hurt, betrayed, on Edward’s behalf; she was sure she was in the right. But now, she looks at her watch and it’s ten past eight, and Simon should be home around now but then he didn’t answer her call, he had no reception half an hour ago and she can’t work it out, and she thinks:

  What if he just never comes home?

  Emily’s room

  There are rooms in this house that they rarely go into. The second floor, for example, where the ceilings once lowered upon lowlier occupants, is now largely a repository for the junk and detritus of the last three generations — some of Julia and Simon’s old furniture has been stashed here among the serviceable old servants’ beds and wardrobes. The largest room, the nursery, is a dust-sheeted wasteland, as if long-fallen snow had drifted upon the vague oblong forms just visible in the curtained permanent twilight; the kind of landscape that to an adult seems desolate, and that would delight a child, and needs only a little explorer to bring it glistening to life. The last children to spend their days here were Edward, Thomas and Helen, almost a century ago; the house has since been childless, as each generation forsook it while those that remained were barren. There are still some boxes of books and toys that Julia and Miranda were allowed to play with, carefully, and which Julia imagined she would show to her own children in turn; and although she has not allowed herself to imagine such things lately, sometimes a little wooden white fox, once a neglected gift from Emily to her son, wheels itself quietly into a corner of her mind, catching her off-guard.

  Immediately below the nursery, in an unobtrusive corner of the first floor, a rarely opened door has been left ajar. Peering around the frame, we will find a pale-green-painted interior, ample enough for a single bed, a slender wardrobe, a walnut desk beneath the window, inlaid with lighter wood patterning on the fronts of the drawers — one of these drawers has been pulled out and gapes empty, exposing its now scentless liner. Perhaps not quite scentless; if we were to lean right in, sniff at the faded paper roses printed on it, we might just catch the tang of soured hope and sadness. The curtains are open, the windows wide; the evening is filled with the final blaze of the setting sun. The last of the yellow light is trapped in the willow that shushes and rustles outside, every bright leaf folded upon its own narrow, soft shadow.

  Julia peeks in quietly, pushing the door and creeping in as if she fears to disturb something. She returns a bundle of letters to the open drawer and, turning to the dressing table, she sits before the mirror. In this same seat, she watched her face become more her own each year, more the person she imagined herself to be; her skin cleared, her cheekbones sharpened, her eyes became, she saw, possibly beautiful. It seems strange to see that same face now, in this room which felt like her own and which she now so rarely enters, this room in which she outgrew her girlhood. She would take up the necklace of Aunt Helen’s that she most coveted, three strands of pearls fattening to the centre, milky, coral and periwinkle-blue. The three strands diminished evenly to the prettiest part, where the tiny seed pearls were gathered by a flat silver clasp, etched with an intricate and winding oak-leaf design. Julia liked the knowledge of it at the back of her neck, hidden by the mass of hair that she brushed over and over with a shell-backed brush; a thrill would trickle down her spine from the point where it rested, as she imagined a hand pushing aside her hair to find it there; the new word ‘lover’ tickled her skin. The thought of that necklace makes her chest tighten with nostalgia for that time of anticipation, for the woman she thought she would become, the home she th
ought she would have. That home was always modelled on this house, although in those days Julia never thought she would own it; and now here she is, and yet her chest almost hurts with longing for it.

  The mirror has a hinged base in which the sisters still store their inherited treasures, once closely guarded. It contains a jumble of Emily’s and Aunt Helen’s jewellery, precious stones tangled with costume tat. As children, they would race to put them all on at once. Julia would make them laugh by plucking a long strand between two long fingers, holding it away from her body and swinging it gently; with her sharp shoulders and boy’s backward slouch she was every inch the flapper, said Aunt Helen. Now she wears only the silver anchor, or did until she unclasped it tonight, set adrift, no longer sure of the meaning of John’s gift.

  Julia thinks for a moment she can smell Miranda, tobacco and deodorant (those cheap shiny cans they used to buy, Julia the green one, Miranda the purple); but Miranda is far away and of course has switched brands, to a reliable roll-on that will last her the shift. It is possible, thinks Julia, that the room still smells of cigarettes — in the later years of their visits, Miranda would come tapping at the door and the girls would sit and smoke here. Chain-smoking Aunt Helen, enemy of hypocrites, champion of choice, allowed this and even provided an ashtray, a painted pottery dish she’d brought back from Lisbon. This has disappeared from the bedside and resides now on Miranda’s coffee table. First thing in the morning or in the early evening, before she leaves for the hospital, she can be found staring into it at the ash-smeared blue bull in the bowl. She sits with her elbows on her knees, back flat and tipped forward, fag hand dangling over the rim. She is always intent; sometimes, she is thinking of the summers she spent flicking ash at it; most often, most likely, she is thinking of the shift ahead, or perhaps, in recent weeks, of her lover. The ashtray is the only object that Miranda has taken from the house.